Active History

New Paper: Truth, Reconciliation, and the Politics of the Body in Indian Residential School History

January 27, 2016 No Comments

ActiveHistory.ca is pleased to announce the publication of Evan Habkirk and Janice Forsyth’s paper Truth, Reconciliation, and the Politics of the Body in Indian Residential School History

Students playing hockey at school, Circa. 1951, “Pelican Lake Indian Residential School: Photo Album,” File. no. 130, Shelf location 2010-007-001, Algoma University Archives

In March 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada completed its six-year investigation into the experiences of Indian residential school students who had survived years of neglect, abuse, and trauma at these institutions. More than 6,000 witnesses testified at hearings held throughout the country. The purpose of the Commission was to collect and document the history of these schools from the perspectives of former students, bringing a voice to a group of people whose issues and concerns had long been neglected by the federal government and religious organizations, the two main institutions responsible for the establishment and maintenance of the schools. The 527-page Executive Summary was clear in its aim to help Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians move forward from a traumatic past by starting another, somewhat different, conversation: “Now that we know about residential schools and their legacies, what do we do about it?”[1]

From our perspective, as researchers who study the physically active body at Indian residential schools, the Executive Summary brought much needed attention to sport and recreation as important elements of the residential school experience, as well as the reconciliation process. Indeed, sport and recreation are discussed in three distinct sections of the Summary: “Sports and culture: It was a relief”; “Public memory: Dialogue, the arts, and commemoration”; and “Sport: Inspiring lives, healthy communities.” Each section makes it clear that attempts to address the legacies of the school system must include detailed examinations of the different types of sport and recreation opportunities that were provided at specific institutions, as well as how former students understood those opportunities. It was exciting to see an official document acknowledge the significance of this part of Indian residential school history – a history that has affected the lives of so many, across multiple generations.

But having said this, we also found the discussion somewhat inadequate. Our concern stems primarily from the lack of a theoretical approach to understanding the role of physical activity culture in the residential school system. [Read More]

Editors Note: This is the final essay published as part of our Papers Section. We will continue to run longer form essays as part of our new “Features Section.” This section shares many similarities with the former Papers Section (including hosting all of the papers we’ve published over the years) while accommodating additional resources such as our series and theme weeks.

Indigenous Peoples: A Starting Place for the History of Higher Education in Canada

January 25, 2016 1 Comment

Is it time to rewrite the history of higher education in Canada? (Middlesex College, UWO, Wikicommons)

By Thomas Peace

“The Bishop of Huron… applied for a grant in aid of the fund being raised by him for the foundation of a university at London, to be called the Western University of London, and intended for the training of both Indian and white students for the ministry of the Church of England in Canada.”

These words about the founding of Western University were printed in an 1879 summary of New England Company activities in Canada and the West Indies (see this document also). They record the Bishop of Huron Isaac Hellmuth’s soliciting funds for a new non-denominational university in southwestern Ontario. The reason they attracted my attention – and should attract yours – was because of the school’s supposed mandate: “the training of both Indian and white students.” This mandate seldom appears in the popular narrative of Western’s founding story, nor those of many other Canadian universities.

In our present-day discussion about First Nations, schooling and education rarely do nineteenth-century mandates like this feature into the conversation. The history of colonial schooling and higher education in Canada hardly addresses Indigenous peoples directly. When the subject arises, Indigenous peoples in schools or colleges are often marginalized and treated as exceptions rather than symbols and signs of historical processes and contexts that can inform our understanding about Canada’s colonial and imperial past (and present). The assumption is that through the assimilationist and segregationist policies of the Canadian state during the mid-to-late nineteenth century, colonists and Indigenous students had fundamentally different and separate experiences. This assumption is certainly and overwhelmingly true and a point that I am not trying to overturn here or in my broader work. Yet this approach obscures as much as it reveals.

When we look at the subject of nineteenth-century higher education with a wider lens we see some important trends that should point us towards a more critical examination of this subject. Indigenous peoples are figuratively, if not physically, often present at the beginnings of many of Canada’s post-secondary institutions. Continue reading →

Community Engaged History

January 23, 2016 1 Comment

Active history is proud to present a video each week from New Directions in Active History. The conference took place at Huron University College on October 2-4, 2015 and brought together scholars, students, professionals and community members to discuss a wide range of topics pertaining to active history.

Completing the opening presentations is Keith Carlson, professor of History and Research Chair in Aboriginal Community- engaged History at the University of Saskatchewan. In this video, Carlson explores the meaning of “community engaged history” by carefully probing each term. He begins by expanding upon Peter Sexias’ ten principals or benchmarks of history. Carlson stresses the negative impact that “bad history” has on people’s lives and asserts that historians have the power to give voice to the oppressed through community engaged scholarship and projects. He explains that successful community projects occur when the activity, community needs and involvement, and benefits all inform one and other. Lastly, he confronts critics who argue that community engagement of any kind is inherently colonial in nature because it is predicated on the process of “othering” a peoples. Carlson argues that humility and knowing that histories are always incomplete and can always be made better in the future is what allows for the historian and a community to build trust.

History Slam Episode Seventy-Six: Continental Cup of Curling

January 21, 2016 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

20160115_001610 This past weekend at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, curlers from around the world competed in the Continental Cup. Four Canadian teams and two American teams made up Team North America while Team World consisted of teams representing Norway, Sweden, China, Japan, Switzerland, and Scotland. In one of the most exciting finishes in the event’s history, Team North America won, clinching the victory during the final end of the final game.

Last year, we did an episode on curling in Canada and how the sport has achieved its status as part of Canadian society and culture. In this episode of the History Slam, we follow up on that episode by exploring curling’s international presence and some of the key issues facing the sport. To do so, I traveled to Las Vegas and had the opportunity to talk to some of the players about representing their countries, the addition of mixed doubles to the Olympics, and the regulation of new technology and sweeping methods.
Continue reading →

The Cable Citizen

January 20, 2016 No Comments

By Jonathan McQuarrie

Let's Talk TV Following their “Let’s Talk TV/Parlons télé” initiative, the Canadian Radio, Television, and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is compelling TV providers to alter how they provide content to Canadians. In March 2016, Canadian TV watchers will have the option to select smaller bundles or individual (or a la carte) channels, which viewers will be able to do by December 2016, although they will still have to pay $25 for a “skinny basic” package of channels, including CBC, CTV, and Global. These changes have been widely welcomed for offering reduced prices and providing an opportunity for people to reduce their cable bills.

Despite the potential savings, some in the media industryhave raised multiple red flags. The Canadaland podcast presented the opinion of an unnamed industry representative who contended that television industry has become even more conservative in their willingness to fund Canadian content, as they anticipate lower subscription rates and revenues. (Intriguingly, the anonymous representative notes that CBC is an exception to this, likely as they became more optimistic with the change in government). Jesse Brown, the Canadaland host, also references wide sentiment that the upcoming changes to CRTC regulations will lead to the end of a number of niche channels.

Further, a Nordicity report commissioned by the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television, and Radio Artists (ACTRA), Canadian Media Guild, Directors Guild of Canada, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, and UNIFOR painted a grim picture of the ramifications of the CRTC changes. The anticipated loss of revenue from the new system, the report warns, will lead to a $970 million decrease in revenue for Canadian specialty and pay services by 2020, and estimates that the decreased revenues will contribute to the loss of some 15,000 direct and spin off full time jobs. The report in part contended that the great cable cut off is exaggerated, particularly since sports fans and news watchers continue to keep cable, and that radical alterations to the financial model were not necessary. In effect, the report contends that the convenience for consumers to pick their few favourite channels would lead to catastrophe for Canadian film and television workers. It is difficult to verify the claims made by the report, although it did succeed in getting some media attention.
Continue reading →

Exploring the Clash of Official and Vernacular Memory: The Great War in Brantford, Brant Country, and Six Nations

January 19, 2016 1 Comment

By Dr. Peter Farrugia and Evan J. Habkirk

The American historian, John Bodnar has argued that “Public memory emerges from the intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions.” Official memory in his conception is propagated by elites who attempt to advance their vision “…by promoting interpretations of past and present reality that reduce the power of competing interests that threaten the realization of their goals.” Meanwhile, vernacular culture “…represents an array of specialized interests that are grounded in parts of the whole. They are diverse and changing and can be reformulated from time to time by the creation of new social units…”[1]

All images are the authors’ own.

These distinctions between official and vernacular cultures become particularly relevant when we enter the realm of the First World War centenary. There are many organizations that are currently grappling with the question of what they should commemorate: the official grand narratives championed by Government or the multi-narratives that have been generated at various levels in Canadian society. Since its founding in 2012, the Great War Centenary Association, Brantford, Brant County & Six Nations (GWCA) has explored these issues, while seeking to find a way to honour the contributions of the more than 5,000 men and women who served from the three named communities.

Continue reading →

The Problematic Spectrum: Historical Trajectories of Gender, Sexuality and Health in a Not-So-Progressive Age

January 18, 2016 1 Comment

By Beth A. Robertson

This past December, Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) announced that it was closing its Child, Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic. The announcement came after two independent reviews were released, deeming the approach of psychologist Dr. Kenneth Zucker, founder and then head of the clinic, as out of step with current medical approaches to gender identity in children.

The transgender community welcomed the announcement, who had long been concerned with Zucker’s methods since he established the clinic in 1975. Numerous reports from adults who were once treated by Zucker claimed that the prominent psychologist actively tried to “prevent kids from growing up to identify as trans”. Japhy Grant, a journalist with Queerty, stated in 2009 that Zucker was “Public Enemy Number One to transgenders” insisting that he essentially treated transgender children as though they had a mental disorder that needed to be cured. Other have argued that his techniques were akin to reparative therapy. It was just these reports that eventually influenced the CAMH to seek an independent review of the clinic in the first place. Continue reading →

Bridging the Gap Between Historians and the Public

January 16, 2016 No Comments

This week, Christopher Moore, a member of our opening plenary round table at the New Directions in Active History Conference, discusses what he feels active history means, and how it is applicable to bridge gaps within the profession of history as well as historians and the public. Moore lays out his perspective on how this can be accomplished through historical blogs and social media that engage with Public Policy.

When History Needs an Intervention

January 15, 2016 Comments Off

By Mary Jane McCallum

Cover page of “Education — A Vehicle for Change”, essay written by the author’s mother in the late 1970s. Photo by author.

Thank you to Crystal Fraser for guest-editing #AHindigenous at ActiveHistory this week. Her initiative exponentially increased Active History’s content by Indigenous people and likely its Indigenous readership. To Leanne Simpson, Zoe Todd, Claire Thomson, Daniel Sims, Adam Gaudry, Anna Huard, Lianne Charlie, Norma Dunning and Billy-Ray Belcourt, thank you for your thoughtful and inspiring posts. Each piece makes vital contributions, and together they highlight some of the key themes in contemporary Indigenous scholarship: rootedness in place and land; family and kinship as inspiration and methodology in Indigenous history; critical analyses of the politics of recognition and reconciliation in a context of entrenched historic and ongoing colonialism; and identifying solid concepts and practices of decolonization. Their work is creative, critical, and attentive to change and continuity over time; it gives special insight to our own complex and often contradictory moment in Indigenous history. In this piece, I bring these valuable contributions into conversation with my thoughts on the new Indigenous Course Requirement at the University of Winnipeg.

Continue reading →

Political Depression in a Time of Reconciliation

January 15, 2016 2 Comments

By Billy-Ray Belcourt

It’s tough: knowing that you might not get the world you want and the world that wants you back, that your bones might never stop feeling achy and fragile from the wear and tear of mere existence, from the hard labour of getting through the day. Ours are bodies that have been depleted by time, that have been wrenched into a world they can’t properly bend or squirm into because our flesh is paradoxically both too much and not enough for it. In the wake of both eventful and slowed kinds of premature death, what does it mean that the state wants so eagerly to move Indigenous bodies, to touch them, so to speak?

Reconciliation is an affective mess: it throws together and condenses histories of trauma and their shaky bodies and feelings into a neatly bordered desire; a desire to let go, to move on, to turn to the future with open arms, as it were. Reconciliation is stubbornly ambivalent in its potentiality, an object of desire that we’re not entirely certain how to acquire or substantiate, but one that the state – reified through the bodies of politicians, Indigenous or otherwise – is telling us we need. In fact, Justice Murray Sinclair noted that the launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report on December 15, 2015, puts us at the “threshold of a new era in this country.”[1] I am interested in how life might be lived willfully and badly in the face of governmental forms of redress when many of us are stretched thin, how reconciliation, though instantiating a noticeable shift in the national affective atmosphere,[2] doesn’t actually remake the substance of the social or the political such that we’re still tethered to scenes of living that can’t sustain us. What I am trying to get at is: reconciliation works insofar as it is a way of looking forward to being in this world, at the expense of more radical projects like decolonization that want to experiment with different strategies for survival.[3]

This way of doing things isn’t working and, because of that, optimism is hard to come by. According to cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich, political depression emerges from the realization “that customary forms of political response, including direct action and critical analysis, are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better.”[4] It is the pestering sense that whatever you do, it won’t be enough; that things will continue uninterrupted, teasing you because something different is all you’ve wanted from the start. To be politically depressed is to worry about the temporal reach of neoliberal projects like reconciliation, to question their orientation toward the future because the present requires all of your energy in order to feel like anything but dying. Political depression is of a piece with a dispossessory enterprise that remakes the topography of the ordinary such that the labour of maintaining one’s life becomes too hard to keep up. We have to wait for the then and there in the here and now; how do we preserve ourselves until then?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hugs residential school survivor Eugene Arcand during the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report in Ottawa, December 15, 2015. Source: CBC

As Leanne Simpson points out, reconciliation has been reparative for some survivors, encouraging them to tell their stories, to keep going, so to speak.[5] But, what of the gendered and racialized technologies of violence that created our scenes of living, scenes we’ve been forced to think are of our own choosing? Optimism for the work of reconciliation disappeared in the face of multiple crises: of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, of HIV infection rates, of mass incarceration, of diabetes, of suicide. Reconciliation, at once a heuristic and a form of statecraft, fakes a political that doesn’t actually exist as such, one that not only presupposes that we – Indigenous peoples, that is – are willing to stay attached to it, but that we are already folded into it, that we’ve already consented to it. What does it mean, for example, to consent to a nation-to-nation relationship if there are no other options to choose from? Continue reading →

Last »